CineSalon by the Sea

Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh; Saturday September 12th  7 - 10pm

The Veiled Garden (Katie Gerardine O’Neill) & Return to the River Act I (Artem Trofimenko, Sophia Santabarbara & Senan O’Connor)

The evening opens with The Veiled Garden, a live cinema sound and projection performance by Katie Gerardine O’Neill. O'Neill is a multidisciplinary artist based in Ireland, working across sound art, film, sculpture, painting, and performance. Her practice explores the body, the psyche, desire and the relationship between the body and mind through tactile, material processes. Drawing on lived experience and research, she investigates themes of inner experience, vulnerability and transformation, creating work that invites reflection on embodied experience and our connection to the natural and spiritual world.

The Veiled Garden… The flicker of a petal, a hint of a young woman’s face, a flash, a mysterious room. A veiled image. Shot on 16mm reversal film in both Latvia and Ireland, this projected piece draws us into a mysterious portal where time becomes stretched, stained, and alchemised by the human hand and the act of looking. An ode to the beauty of analog material in a relentlessly digital era, this piece raises questions around the moving image artist who chooses to work with such material in a world that continually embraces speed and immediacy. The living presence of the artist is not only manifest in the live score she will perform but in the hand processed textures of the film itself, such as the Mordançage technique from the 19th century which allows her to lift, stretch, or completely wash away parts of the image to create surreal, sculptural veils.

This is followed by the world premiere of Return to the River Act I, an experimental feature film by artists Artem Trofimenko, Sophia Santabarbara, and Senan O’Connor. This work was woven together over the course of six years as the collaborators used surrealist clowning, improvisation and fragments of text to bring a short story based on a dream to life. The film invites the viewer to follow the logic of a dream and take the reins as they enter a town at war and follow the footsteps of the town’s failed patron saint. Return to the River Act I is the first instalment of a two-part release with Act II coming in 2027. 

This event is organised by CineSalon and supported by Sirius Arts Centre. It is free and un-ticketed.

CineSalon Open Call Short Films Programme 1

UCC Film & Screen Media Auditorium; Saturday September 13th 2pm

(The auditorium is located in the basement of the Kane Building, B10.B, on the main UCC Campus - directions)

A programme combining short films by Cork- and Ireland-based artists with a selection from the best of CineSalon’s international short film programme.

Audio Test (Chris O’Neill) 

Saving the World (Amin Heydari Fard) 

The Secret Tree (Orlagh Heverin) 

The Jack of Hearts (Sarah Kelly) 

‘Cut’ - Confrontational (Massimo Usai)

Acceleration Protocol (Davey Whitcraft) 

H2H (Hesam Rahmani) 

Teatime (Kate Russell) 

The Thin Pieces of My Soul (Kevin Casciani Nolan) 

Providence (Erica Schreiner) 

This event is free and un-ticketed.

SHADOWS CRAWL ACROSS THE MOUNTAIN OF THE HAWK (M.A. Littler)

UCC Film & Screen Media Auditorium; Saturday September 13th 3.45pm

(The auditorium is located in the basement of the Kane Building, B10.B, on the main UCC Campus - directions)

CineSalon is delighted to welcome M.A. Littler to present his feature film SHADOWS CRAWL ACROSS THE MOUNTAIN OF THE HAWK.

Littler’s work has long moved between documentary, essay film, poetry, music, and the spirit of place. Across fourteen feature films, his cinema has followed musicians, poets, outsiders, mystics, and landscapes, often searching for the point where biography gives way to atmosphere and place begins to speak for itself. Here, that search is stripped to its barest form.

Shadows Crawl Across the Mountain of the Hawk may be M.A. Littler’s most radical film to date. Built from a single image — a mountain known locally as the Mountain of the Hawk, filmed over the course of five years — the film reduces cinema to duration, weather, sound, and attention. Light, fog, rain, darkness, season, and silence pass across the fixed frame. Over time, the image becomes less a landscape than a witness.

The physical mountain slowly opens into mythological space, where geology, memory, animal presence, and older beliefs begin to overlap. A cycle of twelve poems moves through the film like field notes, prayers, and fragments of folklore, joining the visible world to the unseen.

Around them, a suite of avant-garde compositions by sound virtuoso Matt Bordin turns the mountain into a geopsychological instrument: drone, pressure, echo, silence, and vibration moving across the still image.

The result is a stark meditation on place, duration, and the ancient life of landscape — a film in which very little happens, and everything changes.

M.A. Littler will be present for a post-screening Q&A. This event is free and un-ticketed.

CineSalon Open Call Short Films Programme 2

UCC Film & Screen Media Auditorium, Saturday September 13th 6pm

(The auditorium is located in the basement of the Kane Building, B10.B, on the main UCC Campus - directions)

A programme combining short films by Cork- and Ireland-based artists with a selection from the best of CineSalon’s international short film programme.

The Execution of Joan in the Southern Lands (Sepehr Kazemi) 

Stranger Whisperer (Etaoin Melville) 

Autoportrait Aux Épines (Gordon Brendan Delap) 

Are You Tryna Make a Sunset (Ciaran Shanahan) 

Liquid Presence (Tomasz Madajczak) 

Concurrence (Arran Tenzin Bradstock) 

The Devil Don’t Charge for Heat (Shells Le Cain)

The Image Does Not Endure (Saeid Elyasi) 

This event is free and un-ticketed.